[GLLUG] WLAN Purchase

[Jeremy Bowers]

Brian Hoort wrote:
> I'm thinking about purchasing a wireless Access Point/Switch/NAT and 
> associated cards.  How goes the experience for WLAN and Linux these 
> days?  Stable working drivers for most NICs?  There shouldn't be any 
> compatibility problems with the routers, right?
> 
> Thanks for input.

As of three months ago or so, you can't walk into a store and buy any 
cards that have Linux native drivers, at least for b. This can change at 
any time, of course, so it may have changed since then, but I checked 
every model of wireless B cards at Circuit City, Best Buy, Amazon 
(excepting a 100$+ used Cisco Aeronet card), CompUSA, their respective 
online presences, and a couple of local stores.

Those ******'s (insert creative expletive) at the wireless card 
companies think that if you completely change the insides of a card, 
from one that has a Linux native driver to one from a completely 
seperate company, that it is OK to go from "V. 240 rev.3" to "V. 240 
rev.3a"... or ever drop the model number entirely. (Seriously; Link-Sys 
did this on at least two of their upgrades of one of their most popular 
model numbers, and now if you go to their site to download firmware 
upgrades, they have to ask you to look at the *serial number* to see 
which version you have. Stupid, stupid, stupid.) Match the model numbers 
*precisely*, letter for letter, if you're researching what chipset a 
given card has.

It is quite likely you'll need to go with ndiswrapper or Linuxant's 
DriverLoader (commercial). I went with the latter (ndiswrapper didn't 
work for me at the time), and when it works, it works, though I still 
don't have WEP. (Can't say I'm too upset since I consider it only just 
barely slightly better then nothing.) Getting it to work was a pain; I 
had to twiddle kernel settings almost randomly or it would "oops" the 
system. I never was able to nail down any one setting that caused the 
conflict; it seems to be a combination of several things. Fortunately, 
there's a free trial, and ndiswrapper of course.